In addition to this open maneuvering, there was a covert, foot-dragging resistance by many veteran bureaucrats. They were jealous. They suspected Chambers of empire-building in order to make aviation a sinecure for himself. Ships, planes, and fleets were nebulous things to these men for whom the only reality was their individual spot in the Washington sun.
When Chambers persisted in his campaign, the opposition got rough. Captain Fletcher complained that aviation took so much of his assistant’s time that his regular work was being neglected. Then Chambers was refused clerical help for his aviation correspondence. So he answered letters in long-hand, using this circumstance as an additional argument for an Office of Aeronautics. Every letter, to anyone, on any subject, included a plug for his proposed organization. In addition, he set forth his aviation ideas in several magazines.
In March 1911, his article, “Aviation and Aeroplanes,” was the first original work on aviation to be printed in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. It comprised a lengthy report of the machines and the flying at Belmont Park and Halethorpe and told of Ely’s work for the Navy. It stated the case for scouting planes, an Office of Naval Aeronautics, and a National Aeronautical Laboratory.
Soon after this article appeared, Secretary Meyer addressed a long, involved memorandum to Chambers, made him a handcuffed coordinator, and did nothing to check interbureau bickering. That day Chambers wrote to the Wrights’ factory manager, saying he was “running into obstruction in establishing the Office of Aeronautics,” but that he still hoped to have naval aviation started right.
In the spring, Admiral Dewey had Chambers ordered to the General Board. Ostensibly Chambers was to advise on aviation. Incidentally, the move made the Board’s typists available to him, but this break lasted only a couple of weeks. Then President Taft approved an appropriation bill which included the first funds for naval aviation. Over Dewey’s protest, Chambers was immediately assigned to the Bureau of Navigation to handle this.
Next to the chief of this Bureau, Admiral Reginald F. Nelson, Chambers was the senior officer attached. Nevertheless, the chief told him to work at home since there was no room for him, nor for aviation, at the Bureau. Instead, Chambers moved himself into Room 67, a hole under the basement stairs of the old State, War, and Navy Building. A caller described this as being about eight feet square, half filled with files, leaving barely room for a man and a desk. It was a good place to take cold and was “so unsanitary,” said Chambers, that no one wanted to take it away from him.
2. Eugene Ely’s “flying gear” consisted of an inflated bicycle tube tied over his stained leather jacket, a padded football helmet, and goggles. His “seat belt” was a length of rope looped over each shoulder which could easily be shrugged off in case of accident. His plane was a Curtiss landplane with pneumatic landing wheels. In case of a forced landing in the bay, metal air tanks were secured to each side of the plane to help keep it afloat, and a skid was placed forward to prevent “nosing up” in the water.
For over three years his proposal for an Office of Aeronautics was tossed out every time it was brought up. During those years, Chambers’ unofficial cubbyhole under the stairs was headquarters for naval aviation.
After his successful flight from the Birmingham, Ely received a fulsome letter of congratulations from Secretary Meyer.
“That four-flusher has a crust to congratulate me,” Ely commented. “He tried to stop me.”
And with that, he threw the letter at the wastebasket. After he stamped out of the room, Mabel Ely salvaged it for a souvenir. Then it was discovered that it bore the initials “WIC.” Chambers had drafted it.
Then came another letter, this time from Chambers himself. He asked if Ely still wanted to fly on and off a ship. If so, when and where would he be available? Ely wired his acceptance, suggesting San Francisco, where he expected to take part in an air meet during January 1911.
The commander of the Pacific Fleet was authorized to choose a convenient ship and arrange the details. Before Christmas, platform plans were sent to the Mare Island Navy Yard, with instructions not to spend over $500 on the project. The letter mentioned that the Birmingham’s platform had cost only $288, but it did not say the money had been put up by John Barry Ryan, and not the Navy!
In due course Rear Admiral Edward Barry, commanding the Pacific Fleet, named the armored cruiser Pennsylvania for Ely’s second demonstration flight. This vessel had nearly four times the tonnage and was a hundred feet longer than the Birmingham. Late in December 1910, at the Los Angeles air show, the Admiral’s liaison officer and Ely agreed to set the date sometime during the San Francisco air meet. Ely wanted to pick the weather and test his gear. He did not want to worry as he had in Norfolk.
Gene and Mabel Ely registered at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on the evening of 4 January 1911. The Pennsylvania had moved up to Mare Island that morning. Her skipper, Captain Charles F. (“Frog”) Pond, a classmate and friend of Chambers, was a square-faced little man with a shaggy gray mustache and laughing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Naval Constructor Gatewood, from the Navy Yard, supervised the building of a platform above the quarter-deck. It was 37 feet longer and 7 feet wider than the Birmingham’s platform, and it had a 14-foot apron drooping over the ship’s stern. Forward of this overhang, the planking sloped gently up over the after gun turret to the bridge deck at the base of the mainmast. There were two low canvas barriers just aft of a two-inch timber backstop. Said Gatewood:
“We’ll hang a canvas screen from that searchlight platform to catch you if the sudden stop throws you.”
Ely announced stiffly that he intended not to crash, but to land. However, the thick steel mast, just forward of the platform, flanked by two tall boat cranes, looked terribly solid. He did a lot of thinking on the ferry ride back to the city. He needed something on that platform to prevent a possible overshoot. The arrangement that he devised was essentially that used on the carriers of a much later day. Controversy still exists as to the source of the idea.
3, 4, 5, 6. White lines, with 50-pound sandbags secured at each end, Were stretched at 3-foot intervals to prevent the plane from crashing into the mainmast at the end of the platform. Hooks were secured underneath the plane to catch on the lines, which were raised several inches above the platform by two longitudinal wooden rails. Tarpaulins placed on either side were to catch Ely if the craft skidded off the runway. His plane passed over ten of the arresting lines before it eased down and landed lightly on the platform, and the hooks began engaging the ropes. After a 30-foot run, the drag of the sandbags stopped the 1,000-pound aeroplane within 50 feet of the end of the platform.
Curtiss, in his Aviation Book, noted that he went to Mare Island with Ely and told the Navy Yard people “just what would be required . . . across the runway we stretched ropes every few feet with a sandbag at each end.”
Some years later, Hugh Robinson, a Curtiss man who had been present at the San Francisco meet, related how he had once worked in a circus where a pretty girl rode a car down a steep track, looped the loop, then stopped herself by plowing into sawdust heaped on the track. Robinson hated to see her covered with sawdust at every show. So he rigged hooks on the car to pick up weighted lines which would stop the car clean. Robinson claimed that at San Francisco he had suggested the same system to Eugene Ely.
In an interview more than 40 years later, Rear Admiral R. F. Zogbaum, Jr., who had been a young officer aboard the Pennsylvania in 1911, remembered that he had